Bones In Soil
by stretch the faunlet
Summary: She could clearly hear the voices of them, of the dead, of the murdered, the buried and the violated, whisper and eventually scream in her ear. A one-shot of the morbid mind of Gaz Membrane.


**Bones In Soil**

You could say she was obsessed with it.

The many internet searches, the numerous books borrowed from the local library, the newspaper articles collected and stacked on her dresser... They all revolved around a certain topic that she knew was out there, existed in the average day-to-day life, un-dealt with and growing in society.

And Gaz Membrane was well-aware that it happened everywhere.

Death always fascinated her, along with blood and gore, murder... Ever since she was a child. But when she thought long and hard about the mother she only got to know for three short years, the mother who went to work one night and never came home, a new category of real life horror, more harsh reality, was added to the list:

The missing.

Missing women and children. Women who went to work and never came home, children who walked to or from school and disappeared without a trace... The endless searches that turn up nothing, the possible suspects that come and go, the 'what if's?', the speculation...

When she read online or watched on the news about a girl who went missing while walking home from school, or a woman who went shopping and was abducted in a busy parking lot, she always knew what the others knew but were to horrified at the thought, afraid to speak the possible truth aloud: That those women and girls who are taken into cars by strangers, seemingly charming men with secrets, and taken to the woods or out, far, far out into nowhere, raped and killed, then either dumped somewhere, buried somewhere, or dismembered and the body parts thrown into a lake or river, the bag with the bloody body parts held down by heavy bricks so that they'd never be found...

She knew those little-girl-losts who disappeared from almost anywhere, everywhere, had fought, screamed and lost, and that their bodies were hidden so precisely by a possible cold and calculating murderer, and were never, would never, be found.

Such heinous thoughts these were to think about...

But Gaz was fascinated by the concept.

Her freshman year in High Skool was when her odd liking for the missing came to light, much brighter, illuminating a beam of it in her dark void of a mind.

The older she had grown, the more these thoughts of murdered and missing women and children expanded into her morbid curiosity. Morbid her mind was, yet it wasn't the blood shed of the missing that interested her...

It was the wondering of how and why those things happened. The thoughts of a serial killer, why could he do such things to such innocent people? So unlike her these real thoughts were, but it was from her POV, as the daughter of a potential victim;

Jade Membrane, her mother; age 25 when she vanished after leaving work late one night to go home and spend some time with her young children. Her mother never even made it to her car… the ticket home, to safety and warmth. Taken almost like a cold gush of wind had blown her away into a shallow grave, an unknown person, but who? Why? How? Where?

It was those thoughts that drove her mad, along with the one, main question that burned her mind with it's haunting inquiry:

Where was her mother's body?

She knew she was dead; kidnapped in a parking lot, a beautiful young mother of two, by a savaged rapist, a menacing serial killer. Taken to an unknown area, her mother had fought and lost to a man who only wanted to see her plead, to shed her blood, to violate and degrade her very body and being... Later buried or dumped somewhere, and Gaz had no idea where.

And the thought rammed itself hard into her dark heart. The mother she barely knew but even if so, loved her. Her father was barely around, and her brother was just a moron who only focused on stupid paranormal crap; her mother, wherever she was, was the only one she could truly talk to when alone in her private silence.

In every one of her classes, she'd stare off into space, telling herself silently that young children and woman were being kidnapped, raped or killed somewhere in the world at that moment. Every breath she let out, she counted a new victim. Then she'd see her mother, vividly in her mind, remember her identical dark pink hair like her own... her similar brown eyes... Things about her facial features that were taken from the memory of her three-year-old self; long forgotten yet still brought up in photos and distant memories; like calling cards, bringing a voice to a victim that was her mother, in an unfound graveyard of those women and children she focused so hard on.

Once when she had asked Dib what he thought happened to their mother, he responded, "I think she just left us. After all, there was no evidence-"

"You don't know anything," Gaz had seethed, reacting violently to her brother's denial. She had left it at that, turning and going back upstairs, back to her room, back to consuming herself with the names of victims, and she knew most of the major names and how they vanished by heart, names, ages, dates, but never answers:

_Carla Daniels, snatched by a stranger in a car while waiting at a bus stop on morning. Date: April 8th, 1983. Age 13._

_Jenny Lewis, vanished while walking home from a friend's house. Date: March 22nd, 2001. Age 9._

_Sarah Fletcher, kidnapped in a public parking lot of a Wal-Mart. Date: August 6th, 2003. Age 18._

_Laura Wells, at a bar with friends and left, willingly, yet, unknowingly, with a man who had put something in her drink. Date: May 29th, 1999. Age, 22._

Veronica Stewart and Alyssa Rogers, both vanished while walking home from school together. Body of Alyssa found later in a bag floating in a small ravine, body cut into pieces. Veronica's body never found. Date: November 4th, 1994. Both were 15...

And Gaz would close her eyes, the last name, one of millions of names of the missing, sinking in:

_Jade Membrane, vanished while leaving work one night. Body never found. Mother of two. Date, December 23... Two days before Christmas..._

The names of the victims,-the violated children and women whose bodies were buried in fields, under houses, dumped in lakes, dismembered body parts in bags-, were screaming silently, and her mother was among them. At night when she slept, at the age of 14, then soon 15 and later 16 and 17, the names would tear at her skin within the darkness, screaming out how they died, and who had killed them, where and when... The names and dates embedded into her mind that half the time, it was all she could see. Years, names, and ages, years, names and ages... But never a location of the body or the name of the person responsible... When they screamed the answers in her dreams, it was always muffled, as though just as they answered, a gag slipped into each of their mouths, and yet they'd still yell and plead, like they had in death; Kept silent in a moment of horrendous and unimaginable torment.

None of if frightened her at all. Gaz feared nothing. In her own, odd way, she felt pity for them, knowing they were just lost souls whispered between people who heard about them, brought to life in brief moments of spoken words exchanged, before being buried at the end of each sentence. That they just wanted to have a voice in death; To be heard by the living. The real living were to blind and deaf to hear the murdered calling out for justice, but Gaz was, in a way, far from human. She stood, -away from the faded blur of a boring reality she lived in daily-, bravely on the line that separated the living from the dead, and though she couldn't see the line, she could clearly hear the voices of them, of the dead, of the murdered, the buried and the violated, whisper and eventually scream in her ear. They reminded her that each of them were on a long list of those who would never have a proper burial, families who grew old after years of questions, and later died without answers. How awful it was, and she realized she was a part of one of those families.

Her mother could never be buried, would never be found, and no one, not even her could figure out what had happened that dark winter's night; chaste white snow covered with her mother's pure blood…

In High Skool, the murdered women and children would be brought to life, secretly, without Dib, Zim or Tak knowing. In art class, she'd always draw portraits of the same young woman, over and over, covered in blood or a noose around her neck, stabbed, stabbed, stabbed, dismembered... Bones un-recovered, the eyes wide with a fear that reflected back a picture of a killer going free, and of a ghost, a wandering spirit, an innocent child, woman, dying at the hands of evil.

And when her fascination silently spiraled out of control her junior year, when she closed her eyes, when she pictured her mother, she pictured a woman covered in blood; throat slit, stabbed, raped, beaten, buried or dismembered...

It was times like those that Gaz cursed her morbid mind.

And in English class, she'd write about the same young woman or young girl, being taken in the dead of night by some creep... These little snippets of her writings frightened her English teacher when he read them, but when he did read them, the reality sank in, too, for him:

That murder had something like a door, and behind it, opened and beyond was blood and horror, and in her sleep Gaz would go beyond this door and learn something new about those missing people every night. That this horror, innocence quietly stolen in broad daylight or at the darkest time of night, was a true reality, that it happened everyday, every minuet, somewhere in the world, to anyone, and that her mother had faced and died in this reality. To never be found again and to only be read about years later, in books and computer articles, long forgotten... Buried in memories like the very dirt floor that most of the victims of disappearances were buried in after immediate death; decomposing bones in soil, never to be brought up again by anyone.

They were like bones, all those names, and to Gaz, maybe they were bones that were supposed to be un-recovered.

Otherwise the horror would seep in for each family, and the truth would be to hard to bare.

Gaz realized, one day during her senior year, at 18, now an adult, that she'd rather not know how her mother had died, or what had happened in her last minuets.

She already knew what she needed to know about what happened.

And the door of murder had sealed itself for good that night, never to be opened by Gaz Membrane again.

The blood and names of the dead subsided, and the mystery of those missing women and children,-those who vanished years and years before, and those who vanished everyday-, ceased...

At least for now.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: I decided to add a back story as to the mystery of the unknown mother of Dib and Gaz, so I gave her a name, small background, and a mysterious ending that is left up to you to figure out. Though I am aware that Dib and Gaz are clones or something along the lines of one…**

**Dedicated to all the missing and murdered women and children of recent and past years, and to their families: you're in our hearts.**


End file.
